I'm seeing a lot of stuff in this thread that seems questionable at best, regarding the purported benifits of dirty vs clean drive tuning, particularly while in SC. Things like:
1. Can scan planets from further away
2. Reduced time to jump to next system
3. Dirty drives are only a problem in combat situations
4. Take off & landing on high-g or "hot" planets
As a few have stated already, thrusters have zero impact on ship performance while in SC (unless someone can verify yaw/pitch deltas, though unlikely) or ability to take off or land on a planet surface, outside of (possibly) having to flip & boost to avoid a hard landing.
Drive tuning also has no impact on scanner range or FSD charge times, unless you've picked up some crazy secondary engineering effect.
Dirty Drive tuning does creat excess heat while boosting, and yes this can be problematic during combat, but dirty drive tuning is almost excusively used for combat; and in fact, to seriously compete in PvP sitations, G5 dirty drive tuning is really an absolute necessity due to the need for manuverability and high precision required for fixed weapons.
If you just want to go faster while NOT in SC and can manage the heat (really only a problem if you're also doing other things - just flying around through canyons and boosting with G5 DD isn't likely to cause at heat issues) then go for it, but don't go looking for any real benefits for exploration.
For exploration, the only difference between an Anaconda with with 7A G5 DD thrusters and the minimum 5A stock thrusters is about 60 tons, which is going to mean reduced FSD range. Now, it is debatable among explorers if increased jump range is considered a benefit or not, and I'm not trying to steer that conversation either way, but one may chose to go with DD tuning on a 5A thruster in order to get the performance of a larger module with thr weight of a smaller one, but oftentimes explorers won't have a power plant or distributor capable of supoorting boosting, because there is zero need for it.
So big DD thrusters likely require bigger power plants and distributors, which increases weight, which reduces FSD range, which is counter to the core objectives of most exploration loadouts. Since the thursters add no objective value, it is hardly worth the trade off.
